Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

"Hauser's manic hoo-ha has left us all a little disgusted at times... Cocksure yet demurely Al B Sure when oppurtunity knocks, he can bring home the wet t-shirts when it's crunch time. Take a ticket. Get drunk beforehand. Bring your own slide whistle." --Rufus T. Firefly, International Player

"Since Hunter's ejection from Major League Bowling, he has shown us that one can and should go too far when pursuing sweet sweet bay marie. Where his poetry is lacking in gumption it is chockfull of the kind of lyric roughshod Welsh Corgies are awoken from nightmares by."--Captain Jeffrey Spaulding, African Explorer

Monday, June 18, 2007

Song confessions: Santana " The Game of Love"

Ok. If you said, "Dude that song sucks!" I might be inclined to agree with you, in any case I'd find it hard to disagree. But I was in Y Not II with Zack on Saturday afternoon and I realized that I really like this. And I told Zack there on that spot/stool, "Uh oh, I think I really like this song!" Like the scene in Revenge of The Nerds where the cheerleader comes to the sobering realization "I'm in love with a nerd!", only some strange reversal. All the Santana shit I don't care about, let's get that straight. It's the way Michelle Branch stretches out 'whyyyyyyyyy-hyyyy don't you come around no more?' that gets me. It makes me cringe with a combination of swooning pleasure and revulsion that I can only identify as love. A peculiar kind of love, for that of a song with at least one moment of beguiling 80s-reminscent vocal histrionics to rival anything from Aha, Howard Jones, Ariel Pink or...Til Tuesday "Voices Carry"This is my favorite song on the Polish Falcon jukebox. I know there are more tastefull things on it, The Beatles, a Dylan's Greatest, even the Everly Brothers (tho no "I Know We'll Love Again" or "You're Gonna Be Lonely" or even "Dream") but this is just a perfect fucking pop song. The cautious, ephemeral fade-in, ghosty keyboards, Aimee Mann's long-since abandoned yelpy vocal style. This has that quality from 80s songs that I find fascinating in that they just seem to leave plume in their wake. Zack said it would be better if the chorus said "This is scary". But that would defeat the whole premise of the song, which is that Aimee Mann's boyfriend is making her suspicious, always wanted her to keep her voice down, keep a low profile. "Fuck THAT!" she essentially says, by the end mockingly yelling "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP", throwing the corsage he gave her back in his face and just generally making a scene at the opera house. If I were a DJ I would play this back to back with "Shut Up Shut Up" by the Residents. I don't think I'd be asked back.Ariel Pink "Oceans of Weep"Rain sounds. Piano sounds. Very plaintive vocals sung over the phone (sounds like anyway). This is one of the songs, like My Bloody Valentine where I'm thinking "What are they saying? And do I even want to know, based off prior experience, and also just the fact that this emits a beautiful sound?" I think Ariel Pink's greatness lies partly in his consciousness of the way music sounds coming out of an abyss. You have a stereo sitting in your room and put this disc in it and it produces music. Is that too reductionist? I think this song is close to what DJ Shadow wanted when he was in his "80s period". Something I admire in a performance is when a performer is willing to just vomit out whatever's there to vomit out and see how far it goes, when art reverts to an infant state, from Suicide to Will Ferrell shrieking in a phone booth.

The premise of the film is hilarious: A man named Dr. Manzini owns an antique store in which there's a pail that contains, ala pandora's box, a bunch of ugly "kids". When the kids get out of the box, wackiness and chicanery ensue. But the real message of the film becomes clear when the "kids" are persecuted for being ugly. They're taken to a prison where the ugly, weird and fat are kept. Up to this point, Dr. Manzini, whose attempts at writing a jingle that will 'send the kids back in the pay-ole!' have fay-oled, so he and a little boy, whose post-adolescent love interest has dressed him in a glittery bowtie and vest sans the shirt ensemble, must free the "kids". The little boy enlists the help of some local bikers from The Toughest Bar in The World, to help him and Dr. Manzini break into the prison. While they're at, they also free Santa Claus and a man being held in a cage marked "too weird". The man does resemble Weird Al Yankovic a little. Is the film a comment on 80s conformity and fashion? (The kid's love interest is an aspiring fashion designer who goes out with a tough lad named "Juice".) And was it written, as my friend Casey suggested, by a flunkie at Topps? Maybe the person who also writes the texts on the back of the trading cards from which Garbage Pail Kids: The Movie was adapted? Someone also pointed out that the girl who vomits (they have superpowers, so to speak) doesn't do so until the end. I forgot how it ends.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

I considered trying a longish post about the last three days of my life, which if they haven't been hell, they were in the vicinity. That's right, I actually consider beforehand what I'm going to post about. Which means I've officially made this blog my surrogate therapy session. Congratulations, unsuspecting visitors! 30 hours of slinging dishes in three days. When they say that physically grueling work takes the life out of you, they are right. But I remember now my rule, tho I never follow it, about wiping the memory clean to a spotless shine after leaving that place, which may or may not make things worse. It's all like counting how many needles are falling into the many haystacks around me.All I can say about the last three days is, I won the wet t-shirt contest!